Drunk Beaver's new V3 Inglorious Bastard is one of my very favourite takes on the Blues Breaker format

The latest version of Vitalii Bobrov’s Drunk Beaver Inglorious Bastard Blues Breaker style Overdrive is actually the 4th of its kind, while the main circuit has remained largely unchanged since the first prototype - which also had an additional toggle-switch (3 versus the current 2).

The very first artwork was a sort of 60’s psychedelic scooter montage, then we had the scarecrow variety, next the crowned skull graphic, and finally this exploded Russian tank from the recent Ukrainian conflict - which somewhat serendipitously looks like a skull too - further accentuated by Vitalii’s smart use of the Blue LED’s for its eyes!

The layout of the control topology changed once to more closely match the styling of Drunk Beaver’s Bat pedals - while most of the components have been fairly consistent throughout the different variants. The one exception is that this version has a rather superbly expressive Toshiba TA7727P opamp onboard which sounds amazing.

As Vitalii puts it :

"Inglorious Bastard is our take on the Blues Breaker topology - loud, transparent, and more gain. Like Morning Glory, it has an additional gain stage but utilizes BS170 MOSFET instead of JFET and uses a vintage Toshiba TA7727 pre-amplifier integrated circuit. It has a unique ’Saturation’ control that allows the blending of hard clipped signals into the op-amp. The pedal is very versatile and can do everything from light overdrive to mid-gain distortion."

Controls - Level, Tone, Drive, Saturation, CLIP : Mosfet / LED / Si, BRIGHT : Dark / Bright / Stock.

This iteration of the Inglorious Bastard is beautifully textured - warm, and dynamic and with superb touch-sensitivity - it really sounds special - particularly with LED and Stock options selected. I tend to stick to the LED clipping, while I use each of the Bright modes for different applications.

The Saturation knob is a superb extra control for shaping the character of the output - adding sustain and softening the nature of the output when you need to. And the pedal is so well calibrated that it already sounds superb with everything at noon. With LED Mode selected you really extend the natural range of the Blues Breaker format - more gain, more volume, and more nuance. So it does everything you would expect a Blues Breaker to do - and then a lot more - with the most exquisite flavour.

This is seriously one of the warmest and most expressive Blues Breaker I have yet encountered - which pretty much sounds superb wherever you stick the dials. I am so lucky to have got my hands on both this and the V2 Bloom at the same time - the Mykolaiv Grunge is also impressive - while the Inglorious Bastard V3 and Bloom V2 are extraordinary. If you’re in the slightest bit interested by those genres - you need to check them out.

The V3 Inglorious Bastard is available right now on the Drunk Beaver Reverb.com Store for $150.

I know a lot of you are fans of the JHS Morning Glory - while I feel this Toshiba TA7727P is an even higher watermark.

Note that the existing demos are of the earlier scarecrow variety - there will be one for the new edition soon enough!